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Monday, January 30, 2012

Reflecting on 2011

Most people reflect back on 2011 on the 1st of Jan but I haven't really had a moment to take a breather.So how did 2011 hopes/dreams and goals compare up against the reality of 2011?

Firstly, I never really wrote extensively about my hopes, dreams and goals. It's one thing to harbour an idea about what I want and another thing to actually confess and share them with other people.
If you have previously checked the four public progress bars on my navigation panel - I outlined some progress goals. Let's recap:

Donations to various charities:
Status at 31/12/11: 100% achieved.

I never put a figure to that goal but I will admit that it was $500 and I've surpassed that goal so count that as achieved. The excess beyond what was donated to these organised charities have been set aside to be donated to my poorer relatives in Cambodia when I visit them. I've taken screenshots of the various donation receipts but have been too time-poor to make a collage out of them and post them up. Time is valuable and I'm already burning the candles at both ends as it is.

Edit: On the subject of donating, I realised that I had donated $25 to The Tunnel's 135K project for the Arts/Entertainment industry, $10 to Wikipedia for their fundraising plight and $10 to Getup.org.au which is the voice for the Australian public thus far. Maybe I forgot about them because they're not tax deductible ho ho ho. That brings up the total to $385 which looks pretty dismal (plus what is reserved for charity for poor relatives). I've roughly donated about $1k in total now to WSPA but they are no longer my charity of choice - too much is spent on advertising.

HELP HECS Student Loan
Status at 31/12/11: 100% achieved.

I never put a figure for that either but it was almost $30k (with interest indexation) and due to the Government changing the legislation for lump sum payment discounts being reduced, I decided to just pay my HECS off with a lump sum payment instead of leaving it lingering there.

Investment Capital
Status at 31/12/11: 70% achieved.

This one will have to be changed to 'House deposit' because of a few changes in my personal life last year which means that I'll be buying a house instead of using the funds to invest in whatever I fancy. Although the goal says "To save $X by December 2011", I already knew I wouldn't achieve that goal because it was highly improbable in the first place since it didn't meet the SMART goal setting criterias. That is, goals should be 'Specific/Measurable/Attainable/Realistic/Timely'. It was utterly unobtainable and unrealistic in the first place but I like to have those pie in the sky type of goals sometimes!!

Holiday Fund for Europe
Status at 31/12/11: 0% achieved.

Ouch huh? The goal was to save $12k by late 2012. If you've read my other post about my accounts not being split up into millions of individual accounts, you'll realise that I have everything across three high interest savings accounts and the separation/categorisation is in my mind only. Funds earn higher interest when there's critical mass as opposed to having a little bit here and there such as 'travel funds', 'bills fund', 'Christmas funds' and whatever it is that people like to split their funds into.

When the holiday comes around it will be coming out of the 'Investment Capital'(soon to be 'House deposit') bucket and that's the way I operate >.< ...meaning I essentially don't have a travel budget really... should a PF blogger really be confessing about that? Well I've already confessed that I don't really have a budget at all in previous posts. My modus operandi is to just spend less than I earn. What goes out MUST be less than what comes in. Simple.

That wraps up my Progress Bars for 2011. Stay tuned for new 2012 aspirations and dreams or maybe just travelling plans...whichever way the wind blows...

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